TRUST ME EXHIBITION, SHOREDITCH

An Exhibition arranged by Christina Bohm, Christina Cadogan and Andrés Olow Clase in association with Orion Contemporary at the Jealous Gallery space, Curtain Road, Shoreditch, London, EC2A 3PT
7th October – 16th October 2015, 11am - 6pm every day (including Sunday)
Evening View Wednesday 14th October, 6 - 9pm.
Reality is the conjectured state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they appear or might be imagined. The “Trust Me” exhibition explores construed realities of artists from Germany, Sweden and South Korea. Each work by Joakim Allgulander, Sea Hyun Lee and Lothar Osterburg invites us to consider our own as well as their perceptions of a particular reality.
German born Osterburg, currently lives and works in New York. As a child growing up in Germany, he heard tales about America from his great aunt. Old films and literature combined with these stories built up an image of a compelling and exciting city. When Osterburg moved to New York in his thirties, he started incorporating his childhood visions into his oeuvre. Building small scale models, he photographs them and prints them using a copperplate photogravure process. The resulting works have a timeless quality, creating visions of a city full of mystery and endless possibilities; part fact, part fiction - amalgamating a past and imaginary world.
Across the globe, South Korean Sea Hyun Lee, paints striking images of one of the most politically loaded landscapes in the world - the Demilitarised Zone cutting across the Korean peninsula. This ghostly mountain range, apparently untouched by civilisation, is depicted in swathes of red wash; unmarked areas of white meandering between islands of crimson land. What is, at a first glance, purely a beautiful image of a mountainous landscape, is actually a fragmented alienating world. Lee’s paintings function in the same way as political ideology- a pervasive wash of colour draws a mask over the way we perceive the landscape. Our perception of reality is distorted.
Our final artist, Swede Joakim Allgulander’s ‘Trust Me’ cements the central notion of the exhibition; an exploration of the boundaries between dream, reality and preconceptions of truth. Allgulander’s ‘Sunset’ immediately conjures an image of one of the most romantic and beautiful phenomena that nature has to offer but created in a fluorescent cascade it befits a red-light district, the opposite of romantic love and hope; a very different reality.
Engaging and thought provoking, history, politics, literature and myth are explored through powerful and aesthetically striking means. Through the artists’ works, we are invited to imagine their reality and it quickly becomes subjective. In an era when we are constantly being sold different versions of what is real through media and social media, we look at dream and reality and the ways in which the boundaries are blurred. Ultimately it is left to each of us to decide what or who to trust.